Charles McGonigal

"A witness subpoena obtained by Insider seems to indicate that the government, in part, was looking into McGonigal's business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election." Charles Franklin McGonigal was no ordinary FBI agent. As the chief of counterintelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York, he was tasked with rooting out foreign efforts to steal vital national security and economic secrets in one of the world’s most fertile cities for spying. Federal prosecutors and his former colleagues say he held off-the-books meetings with foreign politicians and businessmen and accepted illicit payments while doing favors for associates. McGonigal’s arrest ia in part based on accusations that he had worked for a Russian oligarch. McGonigal appears set to become one of the highest-ranking F.B.I. agents ever to be convicted of a crime. He is accused of concealing details of his finances and activities overseas, violating U.S. sanctions and laundering money. Some charges carry potential prison sentences of up to 20 years, After graduating from Kent State University, and working briefly for the National Bank of Canada in New York City, Mr. McGonigal joined the F.B.I. Assigned to investigations into the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island and the Sept. 11 attacks. He later earned a graduate degree at Johns Hopkins University. McGonigal's wife, Pamela, had been a year behind him at Kent State. He had left his family in Maryland, and, soon after moving to New York, begun an affair with a woman who socialized in law-enforcement circles - ending their affair after he retired from the F.BI. in 2018. After retiring from the bureau in late 2018, and taking a job as vice president for security at the real estate firm Brookfield Properties, Mr. McGonigal began working for Mr. Deripaska, prosecutors said. He and the former diplomat connected the oligarch with an American law firm, Kobre & Kim, in 2019 to aid in getting the sanctions lifted.